Accurate Positioning for Vehicular Safety Applications – the SAFESPOT Approach

Abstract

One of the main restrictions of present-day driver assistance systems is the limited temporal and spatial horizon. In order to overcome this limitation, the European integrated project SAFESPOT aims to develop a safety margin assistant, which provides the driver with appropriate recommendations for how to avoid critical situations. For reaching that goal, positioning algorithms with sub-meter accuracy are necessary. In this paper, the SAFESPOT approach for accurate relative positioning of vehicles is presented. The main idea is to combine several sources of information from a cooperative vehicle ad-hoc networks using a data fusion module. Thus, the single positioning technologies (e. g. satellite navigation, communication signals, and landmarks) as well as the data fusion algorithms are explained. The results are expected to improve localization accuracy in a way which makes it possible for vehicular safety applications to determine even the lane in which a vehicle is travelling.